This Background is intended to provide the basic context of this patent application and it is not intended to describe a specific problem to be solved.
For data on a given storage device, such as a hard disk or a flash device, to be accessible on a computing device, the operating system on the computing device needs to be able to recognize and understand the one or more file systems used on the storage device. To recognize a file system, the operating system examines the file system data structures on the storage device for specific, identifying characteristics and then compares the characteristics of the file system data structures on the storage device against the characteristics of a list of known file systems that can be accessed by the operating system. If the characteristics of the file system data structures are consistent with those from one of the known file systems, then the operating system can access the data on that partition of the disk. If the structure is not known, the operating system assumes that that partition of the storage device is empty and needs to be formatted, even if there is data there that is in a format that is not understood.